Modern Imperialism, Monopoly Finance Capital, and Marx's Law of Value. Samir Amin
concerning the interlinking of the “standard commodity” (gold) and the role of credit in creating and destroying money. I likewise have put forward several theses about this subject under the new conditions in which the metallic standard has been generally abandoned.4 The fact remains that human societies—on account of their alienation (in this instance, the market alienation proper to capitalism) always need a “fetish.” Gold, in the last analysis, remains that of our “modern” world, as is seen at moments of accumulation crisis—our present moment, for example.
A third family of disparate elements, whether they define a general conjuncture (times of easy growth and times of sharpening competition among capitals) or special conjunctions (“new” products versus products whose growth potential is becoming exhausted), enters into the determination of observed market prices.
The absolute empiricism that is the standpoint of vulgar economics, dominant in Anglo-Saxon cultures even more than elsewhere, claims to draw “laws” allowing the understanding of economic life directly from the observation of immediate realities (prices such as they are). Its failure—as our subsequent consideration of Sraffa’s model will show—simply reveals the ideological nature of vulgar economics, reduced to chatter designed to legitimize the activities of capital.
5.THE UNAVOIDABLE DETOUR BY WAY OF VALUE
What does the law of value state? That products, when they are commodities, possess value; that this value is measurable; that the yardstick for measuring it is the quantity of abstract labor socially necessary to produce them; and, finally, that this quantity is the sum of the quantities of labor, direct and indirect (transferred), that are used in the process of production. The concept of the commodity and the existence of the law of value, formulated in this way, are inseparably interconnected.
What does the law of value not state? That commodities are exchanged in proportion to their values; and that direct labor is present labor, whereas indirect labor is past labor crystallized in the means of production. (Volume II of Capital is based on the fact that the production of the means of production and the production of consumer goods are not successive in time, but simultaneous, this simultaneity defining the social division of labor in its most fundamental aspect.)
Possessing a certain value and being exchanged at that rate are two different notions. Marx says that, in the capitalist mode, commodities are exchanged in accordance with relations defined by their prices of production. Is this a contradiction? Does it mean that making a detour by way of value is pointless? My view is that neither is so.
Prices of production result from a synthesis of the law of value, on the one hand, and the law of competition among capitals, on the other. The first-mentioned factor, the more fundamental of the two, would cause exchange to take place in accordance with value in a mode of production reduced to the sole reality of domination by the commodity, that is, simple commodity production. This mode does not exist in history. The capitalist mode, which cannot be reduced to this, is characterized by the presence, alongside domination by the commodity, of the fragmentation of capital and competition among capitals (and capitalists). Visible reality, in the form of prices of production, results from the combining of these two laws, which are situated on different levels.
We say that prices of production result from the combined action of the two laws. Can this combination be expressed in a quantified transformation formula? In Volume III of Capital Marx does this, in his usual way, by giving numerical examples of various possible cases. He does not put forward successive approximations, but confines himself to a first approximation: constant capital stays measured in value, not in price. One can, without difficulty, solve the problem of transformation in an elegant way, without successive approximations, by means of a system of simultaneous equations. Is this operation legitimate? Certainly it is.
It cannot be said that value is a category of the process of production whereas price belongs to the process of circulation. Value and price are both categories of the process as a whole. Actually, value is realized, and consequently exists, only through exchange. It is in this overall process that concrete labor is transformed into abstract labor, and complex (compound) labor into simple labor.
The only condition for transformation is that it should be possible to reduce concrete wage-labor to a quantity of abstract labor. In fact the actual tendency of capitalism is indeed—by subjecting labor to the machine and downgrading labor skill on a mass scale—to reduce concrete forms of labor to abstract labor.
The question of transformation has been obscured by the fact that the writers who first tried to carry through the operation begun in Volume III of Capital also wanted to solve a problem that was easily shown to be insoluble: transforming values into prices while retaining equality between the rates of profit resulting from the equations establishing the production prices and that rate of profit expressed in value and derived directly from the rate of surplus-value.
If we abandon this requirement, we find no difficulty in transforming values into prices. Is the fact that the rate of profit necessarily differs from the rate of surplus-value an embarrassing fact? On the contrary, it is normal for these two rates to differ: indeed, this result of transformation is one of the essential discoveries of Marxism.
In the “transparent” modes of exploitation, the rate of exploitation is immediately obvious: the serf works for three days on his or her own land and for three days on the master’s. Neither the serf nor the lord is blind to this fact. But the capitalist mode of exploitation is opaque. On the one hand, the proletarian sells his labor-power, but seems to be selling labor, and is paid for the eight hours of work put in, not just for the four that would be necessary for maintenance; on the other hand the bourgeois realizes a profit that is calculated in relation to the capital owned, not to the labor exploited, so that this capital seems to the capitalist to be productive.
I have ascribed fundamental importance to this difference between the transparency of precapitalist exploitation and the opacity of the extortion of surplus-value under capitalism, and have based upon this distinction a series of propositions dealing respectively with (a) the different contents of precapitalist ideology (alienation in nature) and capitalist ideology (market alienation), and (b) the different relations between base and superstructure, with dominance by the ideological instance in all the precapitalist modes and, contrariwise, direct domination by the economic base in capitalist mode. Thereby I have related the appearance of “economic laws,” and so of “economic science,” to the capitalist mode.
Bourgeois economic science (neoclassical, i.e., vulgar, economics) tries to grasp these laws directly, on the basis of what is immediately obvious. It therefore takes capital for what it seems to the capitalist to be, that is, a factor of production, productive in itself, with labor as another factor of production.
6. IS AN EMPIRICIST APPROACH TO ACCUMULATION POSSIBLE?
The strictly empiricist philosophical mind-set of the Anglo-Saxon world, transmitted to all contemporary vulgar economics, means that only observable facts (“prices,” such as they are) count toward the direct deduction of “laws” allowing one to understand the mechanisms of the reproduction of the system and of its expansion. For the “professional” economist, an empiricist and nothing but an empiricist, a detour by way of value is burdensome and useless.
One might confine oneself to replying that to understand capitalism means not only to understand its economic laws but also to understand the link between these laws and the general conditions of social reproduction, that is, the way its ideological instance functions in relation to its base. The concept of value is a key concept, enabling one to grasp this reality in its full richness. Those who carry out the reduction, which I here condemn, always end up by conceiving socialism as nothing but “capitalism without capitalists.”
However, this argument, though sound, is not the only one available. We will, in fact, see that the empiricist treatment of the question, which “economizes” that “burdensome and useless detour” (for it) by directly apprehending reality as expressed in “market prices,” loses itself in a blind alley.
7. SRAFFA’S SCHEMA
In Sraffa’s model the productive system is given (the quantities of each